By BRAD STONE and MOTOKO RICH


Could book lovers finally be willing to switch from paper to pixels?

For a decade, consumers mostly ignored electronic book devices, which were often hard to use and offered few popular items to read. But recently, in part because of the popularity of Amazon.com’s wireless Kindle device, the e-book has started to take hold.

The $359 Kindle, which is slim, white and about the size of a trade paperback, was introduced a year ago. Although Amazon will not disclose sales figures, the Kindle has at least lived up to its name by creating broad interest in electronic books. Now it is out of stock and unavailable until February. Analysts credit Oprah Winfrey, the popular talk-show hostess who praised the Kindle on her show in October, and blame Amazon for poor planning for the holiday season.

The shortage is providing an opening for Sony, which embarked on an intense publicity campaign for its Reader device while people were shopping for gifts in December. The increased competition may represent a coming of age for the entire idea of reading longer texts on a portable digital device.

“The perception is that e-books have been around for 10 years and haven’t done anything,’’said Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reading division.“But it’s happening now. This is really starting to take off.’’

Sony’s efforts have been overshadowed by Amazon’s. But in December it began a promotional blitz in airports, train stations and bookstores, with the ambitious goal of personally demonstrating the Reader to two million people.

The company’s latest model, the Reader 700, is a $400 device with a reading light and a touch screen that allows users to annotate what they are reading. Mr.Haber said Sony’s sales had tripled this holiday season over last, in part because the device is now available in such large retail chains as Target, Borders and Sam’s Club. He said Sony had sold more than 300,000 devices since the debut of the original Reader in 2006.

It is difficult to quantify the success of the Kindle, since Amazon will not disclose how many it has sold and analysts’ estimates vary. Peter Hildick-Smith, president of the Codex Group, a book market research company, said he believed Amazon had sold as many as 260,000 units through the beginning of October, before Ms.Winfrey’s endorsement. Others say the number could be as high as a million.

Many Kindle buyers appear to be outside the usual gadget-obsessed demographic. Almost as many women as men are buying it, Mr.Hildick-Smith said, and the device is most popular among 55- to 64-year-olds.

So far, publishers like HarperCollins, Random House and Simon & Schuster say that sales of e-books for any device - including simple laptop downloads - constitute less than 1 percent of total book sales. But there are signs of momentum. The publishers say sales of e-books have tripled or quadrupled in the last year.

Even authors who were once wary of selling their work in bits and bytes are coming around. After some initial hesitation, best-selling authors like Danielle Steel and John Grisham are soon expected to add their titles to the e-book catalog, their agents say.

“E-books will become the go-to-first format for an ever-expanding group of readers who are newly discovering how much they enjoy reading books on a screen,’’said Markus Dohle, chief executive of Random House, the world’s largest publisher of consumer books.

Perhaps the most overlooked boost to e-books this year came from Apple’s iPhone.

Several e-book-reading programs have been created for the device, and at least two of them, Stanza from LexCycle and the eReader from Fictionwise, have been downloaded more than 600,000 times. Another company, Scroll Motion, announced recently that it would begin selling ebooks for the iPhone from major publishers like Simon & Schuster, Random House and Penguin.

All of these companies say they are now tailoring their software for other kinds of smartphones, including BlackBerrys. Publishers say these iPhone applications are already starting to generate nearly as many digital book sales as the Sony Reader, though they still trail sales of books in the Kindle format.

MaryAnn van Hengel, 51, a graphic designer in Croton-on-Hudson, a suburb north of New York City, once criticized e-readers at a meeting of her book club. But she embraced the Kindle her husband gave her this fall shortly after Ms.Winfrey endorsed it.

Ms.Van Hengel said the Kindle had spurred her to buy more books than she normally would in print.“I may be shy bringing the Kindle to the book club because so many of the women were so against the technology, and I said I was too,’’Ms.van Hengel said.“And here I am in love with it.’’